Tom reluctantly took to the water again, and soon returned with a small rowboat which he had rented from an all-night fisherman. Instead of entering the boat at once, Clay called the boy on deck and handed him a suit of dry clothes. The garments were much too large for the slender youth, but they were preferable to the wet ones he removed. Then, taking two electrics and two automatic revolvers, the two rowed to the shore, secreted the boat in a little slip, and set out for the old house by the river.
“Now,” Clay observed, as they walked along, “you might tell me something about those papers. What do they stand for, and why are they scattered so widely? Is there any one on earth who can read them?”
“The papers,” replied Tom, “refer to a locality in one of the canyons of the Colorado river. We don’t know exactly what it is they stand for. We have been told that our fortune lies there, and so we are trying to get it. It may mean gold, diamonds, copper, silver, or good advice! We never will know unless we get the third paper and go look for the thing which lies behind the big ‘X.’ It is a long story.”
“In one of the canyons of the Colorado river?” repeated Clay. “And that is the reason you two rascals decided to take passage on the Rambler! You expect us boys to take you up to your fortune?”
“We shall pay you for the trouble, you know,” falteringly.
“But suppose you don’t find anything of value there? Suppose the suggestion you recently made about good advice is the correct one? How are we to get our pay, then?” asked Clay, with assumed gravity.
“Then we’ll pay you in good advice,” was the quick reply. “The good advice will be not to take tramp boys on board your boat on the strength of any plausible fairy tale they may tell you! How’s that?”
“Where did these mysterious papers originally come from?” asked Clay, without replying to the last question, but smiling at the quick humor of the other. “Who unloaded them on you boys?”
“Uncle David Durand,” was the reply. “He was a sort of a hermit, and lived in the Grand Canyon for a long time, all alone, after we left him. I guess he lived on the fish he caught and his grouches! Every time I saw him he had fish scales on his vest front and a three-cornered grouch under his crust. He left the papers to us as an inheritance, with the warning that we'd have a beaut of a time finding our fortune! We are having all of that!”
“But you said Don stole the papers. What about that?”